A Rising Tide of Anti-Gay Sentiment in Africa

Last week, after Arizona’s legislature passed a bill that would allow business owners to deny service to gay customers, several Ugandans triumphantly tweeted the news to highlight what they saw as an American hypocrisy: the United States had pressured Uganda’s President, Yoweri Museveni, not to sign an anti-gay bill into law. The Arizona bill was vetoed, on Wednesday night, by Governor Jan Brewer, but Museveni signed Uganda’s harsh new law, which specifies a penalty of life imprisonment for gay sex and criminalizes “the promotion of homosexuality,” on Monday.

Homosexuality was already criminalized in Uganda, but the new law, which comes a month after similar anti-gay legislation was passed in Nigeria, is part of a rising tide of anti-gay sentiment in Africa. The intense popular vitriol being whipped up against gays, combined with the political calculations of the leaders of the countries enacting these laws, has turned homosexuality into one of the greatest supposed threats facing the continent: the root of all social, economic, and political ills.

At a time when gay-rights movements in Africa, some of which have been in existence for nearly a decade, should be making headway in the public discourse, their leaders are being forced to go underground again for fear of their lives. (In 2012, I wrote for the magazine about the Ugandan gay-rights movement, which had been winning court battles and participating in mainstream discussions on sexuality up until the new law was signed this week.) Other countries like Senegal and Kenya have started to enforce, or are pushing to enforce, long-ignored existing anti-gay laws. “I am so sad and worried about ordinary gay people,” the leading Ugandan gay activist, Frank Mugisha, told me this week. “And especially for my friends.” On Tuesday, the Ugandan tabloid Red Pepper ran a cover story identifying the country’s “Top 200 Homos” under the headline “EXPOSED!”—just as the now-defunct Ugandan weekly newspaper Rolling Stone had done in 2010, before Mugisha and other activists had it shut down.

On first glance, Museveni and Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan, have quite a lot in common. They both face waning support from citizens disillusioned with their leadership. Museveni is an aging, autocratic ruler fighting to stay in power, who crushes political dissent and keeps secret negotiations over the production of relatively recent oil discoveries. Meanwhile, his signing of the Anti-Homosexuality Act was done at a public ceremony for all to see. He called gays “disgusting” and said that being gay was a “learned” behavior, revising his previous opinion that homosexuality was a “genetic distortion.” In Nigeria, President Jonathan is embattled on many fronts. He has been embarrassed by revelations of his lack of action against graft and his seeming powerlessness amid a horrific Islamist insurgency; signing an anti-gay bill has been his sole popular move of late.

American evangelicals, who see Africa as something of a last frontier for right-wing policy, fanned the flames of existing religious fundamentalism in Uganda and played a role in helping to draft the new anti-homosexuality bill—which, in an earlier version, would have punished certain violations with death. The law in Nigeria, which was passed under the guise of prohibiting same-sex marriage—which activists never even demanded and, except for the marriage provision, is redundant to a colonial-era law banning homosexual acts—is blatant political maneuvering.

The moral politics of these two laws, and others brewing in Africa, appeal to the insecurities and worries of people who don’t have enough opportunities for education and work, and who aren’t being served by their governments in either regard. And they are not confined to targeting L.G.B.T. Africans. Some countries on the continent have wars on women, too. In Uganda, a recently passed anti-pornography law, which is currently being reviewed by the cabinet, has been interpreted by some to prohibit clothing deemed “sexually explicit.” (“If your miniskirt falls within the ambit of this definition, then I am afraid you will be caught up by the law,” the minister backing the bill explained.) In Lagos State, in Nigeria, women working for the state government have been ordered not to wear miniskirts and form-fitting dresses. Sylvia Tamale, a scholar and the author of several books on sexuality and gender in Uganda, suggests that it is no coincidence that a government that is avoiding dealing with repression, inflation, and high unemployment is pushing the fervor over homosexuality. As for Ugandans, she writes, “The mainstream aversion to same-sex relations consequently reflects a greater fear Homosexuality presents a challenge to the deep-seated masculine power within African sexual relations.” So does feminism.

After signing the anti-gay law, Museveni defended his actions by claiming that he was defending “African values” from Western influence. It’s a familiar and empty argument; homosexuality has long existed in Africa, and it wasn’t until colonialism, in fact, that gay sexual acts were criminalized. The argument is a persuasive one on the continent, though, and one of the biggest obstacles to progress for L.G.B.T. rights.

Mugisha told me that he wasn’t going underground yet, though. He’s currently in the United States, meeting with officials, such as the U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to ask for assistance in protecting Ugandan gays and repealing the law. “We shall overturn it,” he said, simply.

Photograph: Rebecca Vassie/AP

Alexis Okeowo joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She is working on a book about people standing up to extremism in Africa and is a fellow at the New America Foundation.